


Gender Balance in Avatar: The Last Airbender, or, Why I Like The Great Divide

by ambyr



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Analysis, Contains Graphs and Charts, Female Characters, Gen, Gender Related, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-13
Updated: 2014-09-13
Packaged: 2018-02-17 06:30:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2299835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambyr/pseuds/ambyr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A:TLA features compelling female characters as part of its main cast but presents a world in which the background characters, particularly those who hold civilian or military leadership roles, are overwhelmingly male.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gender Balance in Avatar: The Last Airbender, or, Why I Like The Great Divide

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for month_of_meta in March 2012 and discusses only the original show, not Korra or the tie-in comics.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is, quite possibly, my favorite show of all time. I love its magic, I love its worldbuilding, and I love its characters, each of whom come across as a real human being, with distinct flaws, strengths, and motivations. I love, most of all, the variety of its _female_ characters. This is not a show where one Strong Female Character has to stand in for her entire gender. Over the course of three seasons, we see many women--some good, some misguided, some indifferent, some evil--showing many different ways to have and use agency.

And yes, I'm saying a lot of nice things about it because I'm about to rip one aspect to shreds.

I'm far from the first person to praise the show's female leads. There's even a "Women of Avatar" DVD extra where a bunch of fans talk about how much they mean to them. Katara, Toph, Azula, Suki, Mai, Ty Lee, Yue--there's someone for everyone, regardless of preference. The problem is, what happens when you look beyond the leads?

The world of Avatar is, to all appearances, one dominated entirely by men.

Let's start at the top. Earth King Kuei is male; so are the three earlier Earth Kings we know about, and Long Feng, who actually rules. The King of Omashu is male, and when he's replaced it's by the Governor of ~~Omashu~~ New Ozai, also male. Fire Lord Ozai is male; so are the four previous Fire Lords we know about. The Chiefs of both the Northern and Southern Water Tribes are male.

It's not just these highest ranking roles that women in the world of Avatar seem to have difficulty obtaining. All the town leaders we meet are male: Oyagi, Tong, the mayor of Hei Bai village, the mayor of Fire Fountain City, the Mechanist. So are the tribal chiefs: the leader of the Gan Jin, the leader of the Sun Warriors, Sha-Mo.

There's one clear exception: the leader of the Zhang tribe. The Great Divide, the most universally hated episode of Avatar, is the only one that shows a woman in an unambiguous position of authority. I'm willing to forgive it quite a lot for that.

There are women who have fair amount of authority without holding official titles: Aunt Wu is one example, and Kanna another. Women do have influence in the world of Avatar. But it's a subtle influence. Kanna may have moral authority, but in the end she defers major decisions on her fifteen-year-old grandson. 

And that's just civilian leadership. The situation in the military is even more bleak. On the Fire Nation side, present and former, we have War Minister Qin, five generals (Bujing, Iroh, Shinu, Shu, and Mung), three admirals (Jeong Jeong, Chan, and Zhao), a commander (Yon Rha), two captains (Li and Chey), a lieutenant (Jee), a colonel (Mongke), and about a dozen unnamed officers with speaking roles. All are male. On the Earth Kingdom side, we have three generals (Fong, Sung, and How), a captain (Yung), and three unnamed officers with speaking roles; all, again, male. 

This would bother me less if the military were an exclusively male occupation in the world of Avatar, but it isn't. _The Art of Avatar_ indicates that the Fire Nation's Domestic Forces are overwhelmingly female, and Zhao's "Sons and daughters of fire!" speech to his helmeted troops indicates there are women serving abroad as well. We see some of them in the Yu Yan archers. Even the Earth Kingdom has at least one female soldier, whom we see in The Drill. They just seem to hit a glass ceiling, and hit it hard. (The Kyoshi Warriors are, of course, female-lead, but they also don't seem to be a part of the Earth Kingdom's military complex; they're an independent organization. And it's worth noting that Suki ultimately takes orders from the Kyoshi civilian leader, Oyaji, who is male.)

So the world of Avatar is a sexist one. So what? It's got a pseudo-historical setting, after all, and the Tokugawa Era or the Qing Dynasty or the Renaissance or whatever periods you feel best correspond to A:TLA were not known for their commitment to gender equality. Perhaps the creators of Avatar were just aiming for authenticity. That wouldn't be my favorite choice, but it would be a valid one.

The problem is, I don't think it's the choice the creators of Avatar were making. I think they _intend_ the opposite, but fail to achieve their aims because they're not questioning their own internal assumptions enough when it comes to picking the genders for tertiary and background characters. And it makes me feel cognitive dissonance when I watch the show. 

Let's consider the Northern Water Tribe. Their culture is presented unequivocally as sexist. Only men rule, only men speak with authority. Yue can't be her father's heir; she has to marry a man appropriate to rule the tribe. Female waterbenders are healers, male waterbenders are warriors. None of this bothers me. And that's not because we eventually see some of those sexist institutions shaken, perhaps even overturned--though that's fun and all. The reason it doesn't bother me is because it's _consistent_. The Gaang shows up--and Katara's combat skills are ignored, because she's a woman, and that's how their culture treats women. And while Katara, an outsider raised in a (slightly) less sexist society, is deeply angered by how she's treated, Yue accepts her role--because it's what she's been raised to. It's what she expects. 

That makes Yue pretty unique for the show, because, except occasionally for Katara (who did after all grow up in the only slightly less sexist Southern Water Tribe), none of the other female protagonists and antagonists expect to be treated any differently for being women--nor are they. Toph's parents want to protect her because she is "blind and tiny and helpless and fragile"--not, crucially, because she's female. Toph herself is baffled when Katara assumes she might behave in particular ways because she's female. The bureaucrat at Full Moon Bay doesn't question why Toph's the leader of a traveling party. 

Ozai draws Azulon's attention to the fact that while Iroh's heir is dead, he has _two_ living children--he doesn't distinguish between his son and his daughter. When he sends his son off on an impossible quest, he doesn't remarry to try to produce another son or arrange a marriage for his daughter; he's content having Azula as sole heir and he later doesn't blink at proclaiming her Fire Lord. Neither does anyone else. The military is comfortable deferring to the Dangerous Ladies in, for example, The Drill. Mai's parents aren't concerned about their daughter running around unchaperoned. Ty Lee's parents let her run off and join the circus.

In short, the show's female teen leads--Mai, Ty Lee, Azula, Toph, Suki, and even mostly Katara--act like liberated, 21st-century girls. They don't defer to men, and no one (outside of the Water Tribes) expects them to. 

And I can't resolve that with the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom being places where only men can hold authority. The leads' characterization doesn't match that background--nor does how they're treated over the course of the show. The Earth Kingdom apparently has an all-male military leadership, an all-male Dai Li; we see women relegated to being tour guides and receptionists. But no one blinks when the female "Kyoshi warriors" show up at the palace; they're welcomed as honored allies, and immediately trusted with the secret invasion plans. How does B make sense in a culture with A? Why aren't the disguised Dangerous Ladies treated like Katara was in the Northern Water Tribe? 

Either our protagonists and antagonists travel around in little sexism-free bubbles, or the cultures they live in are much more egalitarian than what we see on screen. The former is possible; I can even make up a [Watsonian](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Watsonian_vs._Doylist) explanation. They're mostly rich and powerful, and that privilege could be insulating them. But I think the latter, Doylist interpretation is more compelling.

Over the course of the show, there are, by my count, 381 distinguishable characters with lines. Three of them don't have a clearly identifiable gender. Three hundred and one of them are men. Seventy-seven of them--less than 20%--are female. 

The problem with Avatar isn't that its world lacks women in positions of power. It's that the show frequently forgets to include women at all. It's not just that the Order of the White Lotus is all-male; it's that all but one village shopkeeper (sixteen out of seventeen of them, to be precise) is male, too.

  
[Figure charts all characters with speaking parts in A:TLA according to the number of lines they have. Warm colors are women, cool colors are men.]

Partly this can be explained by the show's heavy military focus. More than 100 of those characters are involved in the military of one nation or another, and we've already established that the military is heavily male. But logic suggests that if you send most of your male population off to war, what's left on the homefront should be mostly female. The show remembers this in its opening episode, when it shows the Southern Water Tribe; it doesn't remember this in the Earth Kingdom or the Fire Nation. Of the civilians we encounter throughout the show (discounting political leaders, which, as mentioned above, are overwhelmingly male), 75% of the ones with speaking parts are male. 

It's not that the show never includes women. If there's more than one of a non-military stock character type--a prison guard, a villager, a party guest, a young child--needed in an episode, odds are good at least one will be female. But often there isn't call for two or three--and if there's only one, the script writers almost always turn toward male as default. This doesn't stand out on an episode-to-episode basis, but when you start counting across the series, the discrepancy becomes stark.

Among the major characters, where the writers and directors were presumably less likely to fall back on stereotypes, the gender imbalance is less severe. Let's define a major character as one who has a speaking part in at least three episodes and at least 50 total lines. That gets you seventeen characters: in order of number of lines, Aang, Sokka, Katara, Zuko, Toph, Iroh, Azula, Jet, Zhao, Suki, Mai, Hakoda, Bumi, Ty Lee, Roku, Yue, and Ozai. But it's worth noting that even here, where they're better represented, the women have a difficulty getting words in edgewise. They may make up more than 40% of the main cast, but they get less than a third of the lines. Largely, this is because season one and its dearth of female characters drags things down, but even latter seasons don't quite achieve proportional representation.

  
[Figure shows the number of lines spoken by each major character in A:TLA, separated by season. Warm colors are women, cool colors are men.]

And it frustrates me, because I think the creators can do better. I know they can create amazing female characters. But I wish those creations had equal prominence to the male characters--and I wish they weren't forced to stand out so starkly against an overwhelmingly male-dominated backdrop.


End file.
